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anyway.” He took out his
cell and made a brief call.
    Pocketing the phone, he said, “My buddy’ll
pick me up. Before I leave, I want to see you safe inside. Garson
Academy, huh?”
    “That’s what they said, but I don’t know
where it is. I’m just glad he’s not still at Lakeside.”
    “Yeah, me too.”
    “I wish he’d get over me. Do people like that
ever get over their obsession?”
    “Not often enough, from the things we hear,”
he said. “Maybe you should go away somewhere.”
    “I already changed schools because of him.
Why should I have to change my whole life? Why can’t somebody do
something about him? Like—well, prison would be good.
Maximum security.”
    “ Okay, then. You stay safe,” he said,
as headlights turned in at the driveway.
    It was Ben, shortly followed by Rick’s buddy.
I thanked Rick again and thought about baking him some cookies.
That was very generous, that thing with the windshield.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    The nurses started
looking at me funny each time I showed up at the ICU and stood
gazing at Hank through his window. Luckily it wasn’t always the
same nurses. I told them I represented The Tiger’s Roar and
had the duty of reporting on his progress. Of which there was none
to report.
    When not at the hospital making an idiot of
myself, I worked on our series. By now I had it all mapped out. I
would lead with the story of Hank and then segue into Paula
Welbourne. Mr. Geyer gave me the names of the other staff members
and I managed to find each one. There weren’t many. According to
Geyer, at the beginning of the year there was usually a roomful of
people, but the number would shrink as they lost interest. They’d
come expecting a nice social time, not any actual work, and leave
when it wasn’t like that.
    “I hope they’re interested in reading it,
anyway,” I said.
    “ Oh, they’ll do that. And pay their
twenty-five cents.”
    That was the selling price of The Tiger’s
Roar. It wasn’t much of a paper, just those eight pages stapled
together. People complained that a quarter was too much, but we had
expenses. It took a lot of paper, a lot of printer toner, and even
the staples weren’t free. As for our time, it was a labor of
love.
    Every week we went semi-pro when a digest of
that week’s issue appeared in The Chronicle, the town
newspaper . We had a whole page just for us in the Sunday
edition.
    Our weekly meetings were on Thursday
afternoon. The week after Hank was shot, all the members showed up.
And Mr. Geyer, of course. He always kept in the background. I’d
been the one to push for continuing, but I didn’t want to take
over. It seemed presumptuous when I was so new. I found out that
Ron Sullivan, a guy with blue eyes and a buzz cut, was supposed to
be the assistant editor. He was nearly as quiet as Mr. Geyer. I
asked him if he wanted to conduct the meeting.
    He smirked and waved his hand in a ‘no
thanks’ gesture. “You go right ahead. You’re doing fine.”
    Shy or sly, I couldn’t tell, but I had to go
ahead because nobody else did.
    First I gave them an update on Hank’s
unchanged condition, and said I had seen him. I didn’t mention how
many times. Then I read what I’d written about him and they
approved. I did my best to make it sound like a temporary thing,
not an obituary. I wrote as though he’d be coming back as soon as
he recovered even though it might take a while. I had looked up
“brain injury” and knew a lot depended on what part of the brain
was affected.
    As I wrote the article, I felt very close to
Hank. I felt it was just he and I. When I read it to those other
people, he seemed farther away. As though I had to share him. Even
though they’d known him longer, they didn’t feel the same personal
caring that I did.
    “ Next week,” I told them, “I’ll have
this finished, with the stuff about Paula Welbourne, too. I need to
do more research on that.”
    Cindy Belcher fluttered her hand. “What about
this